yearofplenty

Chipotle Video "Back to the Start" Advocates for Farmers, Food Movement

This is worth watching.

Portable raised bed farm made from milk crates takes root in New York

An enterprising restaurant in New York has developed a farm to table garden on the dormant construction lot next to their location. According to a Fast Company article, "The farm now contains 7,400 milk crates and over 100 types of plants. Riverpark currently gets about 25% of its produce from the farm, but expects to get more soon."

It's a ingenious design created out of the necessity of not being able to dump large amounts of garden soil on the temporary site they had secured.

Ortuzar and Zurofsky presented their quandary to ORE Design and Technology Group, which proposed the milk crate idea: Staple a piece of landscaper fabric (a material that allows air and water to pass through) to each milk crate, and fill it with soil.

There is now truly no excuse for not growing some of your own food. All you need is a milk crate, a piece of landscape fabric, and a litle dirt. I love it. Now all we need is a design for a milk crate chicken coop.

For some, lentils are "like Kryptonite" - National Lentil Festival in Pullman Aug. 19-20

Last week at the farmers' market someone responded to the prospect of buying a package of dried lentils by saying, "I couldn't do that. Lentils are like my Kryptonite." A few years ago I might have agreed with him but during our year of local consumption I learnd to LOVE lentils. We started our local eating binge in January without any of summer's harvest stored up for the winter so we were forced to turn to local offerings, which included an abundance of lentils. We put them in soups and burritos and salads and I came to really appreciate them.

I learned that they come in beautiful colors like gold/orange, green, red, and black. (In an ironic twist, it turns out Kryptonite also comes in gold, green, red, and black) I also learned that the Inland Northwest is most prolific lentil-producing region in the US. So it should be no surprise that Pullman will be hosting the National Lentil Festival this weekend.

According to the USDA:

Lentils were probably one of the primary domesticates (as were wheat and barley) on which Neolithic agriculture was founded in the Near East about 8,500 years ago. By the Bronze Age, they had been disseminated throughout the Mediterranean region, Asia, and Europe. Lentils were introduced into the United States in 1916, near Farmington, Washington. The commercial production of U.S. lentils today can probably be traced to that introduction of a single landrace.

Lentils are grown in our region as a cash crop, most of which is exported to regions of the world where people don't see the little legumes as a mortal danger. According to the USDA:

Lentils contribute significantly to farm economics in the Palouse and the United States as a whole. The lentil crop, during the last decade, averaged over 54,400 metric tons with an approximate value of $31.7 million annually. About 80 percent of U.S. lentils are exported. Principal markets for Palouse-grown lentils are Spain, Peru, Ethiopia, and Venezuela.

But lentils are also used by farmers as a vital ingredient in successful production of wheat and barley which are the staples of area farmland. The lentils, like all legumes, fix nitrogen in the soil, thus requiring less application of chemical fertilizers on the cereal crop that follows it. They also help reduce the pesticides needed in subsequent crops and reduce erosion. 

One secret of living in Spokane is that the local pea & lentil processors like Spokane Seed have small retail operations where you can buy peas and lentils directly from the warehouse. If you've experienced Kryptonite-like effects from green lentils, I recommend trying the smaller darker colored varieties.

Joseph's Grainery, a local Colfax farmer and retailer, has an excellent website with information on how to cook with lentils. They've even got Youtube videos.

They also make a lentil flour which we've been selling at the farmers' market this summer. It's a gluten free alternative to wheat flours.

And if your children's superpowers are suffering from the thought of eating lentils, the US Dry Pea & Lentil Council has a recipe for lentil chocolate cake and even some cartoon characters.

And did I mention that lentils are cheap and they last forever? What's not to like?

Shepherd's Grain Wheat Co-op Still Stirring National Food Conversations

I write about Fred Fleming and the Shepherd's Grain wheat co-op in Year of Plenty. I wish I could claim to have made them famous but the truth is that national media outlets have been doing stories on them for years. When they are interested sustainable wheat farming, Shepherd's Grain and their no-till farming methods have been a go-to source of information. They have even been featured on CNN. 

The latest story comes from Helene York and the Atlantic Monthly. She is intrigued by SG's partnership with ADM, a company usually touted as the arch-enemy in conversations about sustainable food. York sounds a little conflicted as she writes:

I came away from my weekend with some complicated questions. Can locally baked bread be called "artisanal" if the wheat is from cooperatively farmed wheat fields that end up processed by ADM? What if the opposite were true: if the wheat were milled in an employee-run facility but came from the commodity markets? 

Perhaps the lesson is that there's no one path that can suit every region, especially now, with consolidation having left producers with only a few scalable choices. ADM may have bought up most large-scale mills over the last century, giving groups like Shepherd's Grain nowhere else to turn. But if a plant manager takes a political and operational risk, and makes it possible for a co-op that grows wheat responsibly to survive, is that bad? 

Re-regionalizing our food system will surely mean creating new alliances, some with small entities wishing to grow bigger, some with large entities whose ways we often (rightly) criticize. Perhaps the most sustainable solutions will be those forged by individuals who need each other's support and resources, at interim steps along the way, regardless of the size of the entities they represent. 

I wrote in a previous post about the nature of this unusual partnership between an "artisanal" co-op and a mega-corporation. My post was sparked by a conversation with Fred Fleming and his words, "Hello, my name is Fred and I'm a recovering conventional farmer." I wrote:

I had a chat with Fred about the Inlander editorial that was critical of their efforts. My response is here. Paul Haeder’s basic gripe is that they use Round Up to control weeds and that they invited a rep from ADM to a farming summit who had never been to an actual wheat field. Hint Hint Hint - Shepherd’s Grian is in bed with ADM, the agricultural death star, the evil industrial food complex. What Paul didn’t understand in his critique is that it’s not ADM that has Shepherd’s Grain in its tractor beam, it’s Shepherd’s Grain that is drawing in and converting ADM.

According to Fred, the Spokane ADM mill on Trent that processes almost all the flour in our region, is the only ADM mill in the country that allows a grower like Shepherd’s Grain to process their flour separately. Fred explained that this unusual arrangement has captured the imagination of ADM’s management and as a result Spokane’s mill is seen as a kind of model of the future. In a world where everything is rapidly commodifying, in Spokane, flour is decommodifying and consumers like that and that makes corporate offices of multi-national corporations take notice. It’s actually quite remarkable and it’s all happening right here in Spokane.

In order to innovate more sustainable food practices, it’s going to take folks like me and you stepping forward and saying, “Hello, I’m a recovering conventional consumer.” But it’s also going to take farmers like Fred because consumer demand only goes so far.

Picture: Palouse wheat fields as seen from Steptoe Butte.

"Peak Herbicide" - What Happens When Weeds Acquire Weed-killer Resistant GM Traits?

New Scientist is reporting that oil-seed rape (aka canola) has escaped cultivated land and become a tenacious weed. The battle against weeds is an age-old story, but this new problem comes with a twist. These "feral" canola plants have acquired a resistance to two of the most common herbicides - glysophosphate (Roundup) and glufosinate (Liberty Link). 

Several scenarios could explain how this happened, says Schafer, who conducted the project with her superviser, Cynthia Sagers. "It could have happened if one farmer planted glyphosate-resistant canola, and his neighbour planted glufosinate-resistant canola, for example." Canola plants escaped as weeds from one field could have been fertilised by pollen from the other, leading to a doubly resistant weed.

In case you're not familiar with how modern GM crops work let me explain. Modern crops have been genetically designed to resist the effects of certain herbicides so farmers can blanket their crops with herbicides that kill the weeds but not the crop. Seeds and herbicides are sold in tandem which is more expensive for the farmer, but the ability to kill off all the weeds leads to higher yields.

The scientists say this is not cause to freak out yet, but:

...there's a risk that genes for weedkiller resistance will spread to wild relatives. In 2002, two separate teams showed in controlled studies that wild sunflower and sugar beet could swap genes with genetically modified relatives and become fitter in the process. The latest findings in canola confirm that this is happening. 

The emerging resistance of weeds to herbicides is a ticking time bomb in American agriculture as reported earlier in July by St. Louis Today:

The problem, farmers and weed scientists say, is getting worse: Weeds are becoming increasingly resistant to Monsanto's Roundup, sold generically as glyphosate, forcing farmers to use other herbicides or "multiple modes of action." But during this season especially farmers are finding that these other modes of action aren't working either — and there appears to be little relief on the horizon. In Missouri, herbicide dealers have sold out of Cobra, one of the herbicides most widely used in tandem with glyphosate.

"Are they running out of options?" asked Aaron Hager, a weed scientist with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "The simple answer is yes."

One way to describe the cycle is that we've reached "peak herbicide." If we soak our land in these chemicals over an extended period of time, weeds will eventually find a way around our toxic firewall and there will be diminishing returns. The answer right now is to add more chemicals, and to resurrect older more toxic varieties to use in combination with their modern replacements. This also means that farmer costs are going through the roof and food and other commodities are going to continue to get more expensive. 

Some voices are decrying the "fear mongers" who are questioning GM crops developments. A recent article reflects this:

"Fear mongering is easy to do," said Dr. Frank Shotkoski, Director of the Agricultural Biotechnology Support Project II (ABSPII) based in Cornell University, describing a sustained campaign against crops that have been genetically altered to bring resistance to insects and environmental stress.

"We are reaching a phase when the campaign against agricultural biotechnology is at a high peak," he said.

The key line in the article for me is this one:

"Not a single food safety issue has been verified, there is no evidence of a safety issue in the 15 years and so many million hectares of Bt crops planted," said Dr. Randy A. Hautea, Global Coordinator for ISAAA.

If a consequence of GM crops is a huge spike in the use of more toxic chemicals, isn't that a safety issue? It's take us 15 years to get to that point, but isn't it likely that this will endanger ag workers and degrade land? And isn't it possible that we won't be able to "verify" these consequences until it's too late? Before we hand over the fate of our entire food system GM crops and their chemical antecedents, I'd like to see a lot more research into the consequences to the health of people, land, and economies. I'm not anti-science but for now count me among the fear mongers.

Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible - Paying Attention to the Land

I'm reading Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible by Ellen Davis. In the book she argues that agrarian perspectives offer a helpful lens through which to understand the Bible, especially the Old Testament. She writes; "agrarianism is the way of thinking predominant among the biblical writers, who very often do not represent the interests of the powerful." (page 1)

I plan on writing several posts on the book but I wanted to highlight the theme that struck me from the first couple of chapters. In the foreword Wendell Berry lifts up the importance of local engagement in agrarian thought. He writes:

...this is one of the indispensable gifts of her book - she sees the similarity between this modern corporate colonialism and that of the ancient empires. She sees as well, and even more indispensably, the necessity and possibility of local resistance by means of local religion, local knowledge, and local language.

An agrarian reading of the Bible thus forces the de-specialization of one's thoughts about agriculture. With equal force it de-specializes one's thoughts about religion. It does this simply by seeing that the Bible is not a book only about "spirituality" or getting to Heaven, but is also a practical book about the good use of land and creatures as a religious practice, and about the abuse of land and creatures as a kind of blasphemy. (page x)

Davis picks up on this theme of local engagement and de-specialization in the opening chapter and argues that it's important for a Biblical scholar like herself venture beyond her specialty to explore agrarian perspectives that, it turns out, are helpful in understanding the Bible. It's a move away from de-contextualized specialization to locally-informed, locally adapted practices and thought.

The more I read Berry and understand agrarian perspectives, the more I see how a primary impulse of the movement is to re-integrate human thought and action that has been partitioned by the modern industrial project. For those of us who have been specialized away from land and agriculture we are invited to re-engage, to venture out as amateurs. Davis writes:

For me as a biblical scholar, engaging questions of contemporary social analysis means consciously working as an amateur, going outside my area of professional expertise for the sake of love. Augustine's famous interpretive principle of caritas may provide a theological warrant for such a move: reading the biblical text in a way that conduces to knowledge and love of God and neighbor is the touchstone for accurate interpretation.'

In our present intellectual environment, Wendell Berry advocates amateurism as a corrective to the tendency toward overspecialization and abstraction that afflicts all disciplines. He suggests widening the context of all intellectual work and of teaching - perhaps to the width of the local landscape....

To bring local landscapes within what Wes Jackson calls "the boundary of consideration," professional people of all sorts will have to feel the emotions and take the risks of amateurism. They will have to get out of their "fields," so to speak, and into the watershed, the ecosystem, and the community; and they will have to be actuated by affection. (pp. 3-4).

For Berry and other agrarians the starting place for this kind of integrative work is simply paying attention to one's "local landscape," and while I'm no farmer or soil scientist, I CAN open my eyes and pay attention to the land and agriculture that surrounds me. I can go to Steptoe Butte, like I did last night (see picture), and take some photos. And I can dwell on the abundance of our region and also wonder with concern about how this land came to be understood as "industrial." And I can reflect on the ways this land shapes my faith and practice, and how my faith compels me to advocate for its care.

Africa Staring Down Worst Drought in 60 Years

I was startled when I read that statement in a yestereday's NY Times because I'm remembering some pretty horrible incidents of drought and famine in Africa over the last 60 years. 

Last week U.N. agencies monitoring a severe drought in Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya and Djibouti increased the volume on existing warnings over food shortages in the region, a consequence, they say, of an unprecedented dry spell, instability and higher global food prices.

The potential human cost of this combination of drought, conflict, and poverty are hard to fathom:

UNICEF estimates that about 25 percent of people in Kenya's far north are now suffering from acute malnutrition, including more than 37 percent of those living in the Lake Turkana area. Throughout the Horn of Africa the aid group warns that "millions of children and women are at risk from death and disease unless a rapid and speedy response is put into action."

I predict that in the next 6 months the issue of worldwide drought, crop failure, and famine will likely dominate the news cycle and will potentially change the landscape of the food movement conversation. Go here for a previous post on these emerging dynamics. It could go two directions. It might lead to further insistence on genetically modified crops and entrenchment of global commodities as the "only" way to respond to world food needs. The industrial food complex will double down on the refrain, "How are we going to feed the world without this technology?" 

I hope the crisis sparks the conversation in a different direction though. The other option is for the world's policy makers to recognize that locally-developed sustainable agriculture is a viable, and maybe the best option for addressing food insecurity among the world's poor. It's more complicated than the big bucks and bushels approach of food aid but is necessary to address long-term solutions. 

In the book "Enough: Why the World's Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty", Wall Street Journalist writers Thurow and Kilman highlight the nature of the problem:

For decades, the world has grown enough food to nourish everyone adequately....In the modern world, like never before, famine is by and large preventable. When it occurs, it represents civilizations collective failure.

They go on to identify a major policy shift in world food-aid circles that has led to some of the problems we are seeing today. Instead of helping developing countries nurture their own local food systems to make them self-sufficient there was a move in the 1980's to make countries dependent on imports from wealthy nations.

John Block, Reagan's agricultural secretary as the U.S. farm economy struggled under the weight of price-depressing gluts, put it bluntly: '[The] idea that developing countries should feed themselves is an anachronism from a bygone era.... They could better ensure their food security by relying on U.S. agriculturals products, which are available, in most cases, at lower costs.'

...In the view of the World Bank and other development organizations, food self-reliance became more important than food self-sufficiency: It made more sense for the poorest countries to develop businesses to earn the money needed to import food rather than grow their own. 

Instead of helping poor farmers develop local and sustainable agricultural systems, they were encouraged to get out of agriculture, go to the city and move into the manufacturing sector where their low-wages could be put to "good use" in the world economy. 

This arrangement worked OK as long as their was a glut of grain commodities and low food prices. We are now finding out how that all works when stores of grain are low (because of recent crop failures and biofuel competition), and food prices are high. It's not a pretty picture. 

They also describe a shift in the crops that farmers do grow in developing countries. They have been encouraged to move into cash crops that can be put into the commodities markets and sold, instead of aiming toward crops that lend their communities to self-sufficiency. This has put these farmers at the mercy of world commodities markets whose prices rise and fall without a care to issues of hunger and self-sufficiency.

Le'ts hope in the coming months as this impending human disaster unfolds in Africa and other places around the world we'll be hearing the words "agricultural self-sufficiency" as the center-piece of addressing the crisis.

Fortunately there are some indications massive food corporations like Nestle and Unilever recognize there is a problem as reported in this Fast Company article:

Your local grocery store may be stocked with foods from around the world, but make no mistake: Our food system is starting to fail. Resource constraints, unpredictable weather, increases in food-borne illnesses, and malnutrition (925 million people are malnourished while one billion are chronically obese) are all making the major food corporations rethink the way they do business.

 

Community Gardens Sprouting on Rooftops in Hong Kong

CNN has the story of a growing, but still small urban farming movement in Hong Kong. 

For just $15 per month, Lam rents out toolbox-sized planter boxes to businessmen, elderly couples and families alike, and even runs horticulture classes. He uses imported soil from Germany to fill his planters and lets the humid, subtropical climate do the rest.

Fifteen dollars a month seems pretty steep but Hong Kong does have some of the highest property values in the world.

I thought this comment regarding resistance to gardening was interesting:

Outside of convincing politicians, Chau said Hong Kongers themselves have historically been resistant to the idea of farming as a suitable pastime.

"It is the lowest of our traditional caste system. In traditional Chinese culture, if you're good at nothing else, you work on the farm," Chau said. "Also, Hong Kong is a very money-minded place... land is also very expensive in Hong Kong, so people don't spend time worrying about growing their own food."

America has its own version of this caste system story. The consensus opinion on the growth of the US economy is that advances in farming freed people up from working on the farm so they could apply themselves to other more GDP-enhancing activities. This chart tells the story of the movement out of farm work in the U.S.:

China has its own version of this chart but relative to the American move away from the farm they are in 1850. This chart compares farm employment stats around the world and puts China at 47% in 1999.

In countries that have moved dramatically away from the farm there are efforts in place to reconnect with land and food. My sense is that this, in large part, is what drives the local food movement, the interest in farmers' markets, CSAs, and rooftop gardens - even in Hong Kong. It's a kind of farming-deficit disorder. It may be awhile before perceptions in China change around farming but they are already shifting dramatically in North America.

Food Scarcity Spells Trouble for World's Poor

I wrote a post a few months ago about the role of bread prices in the Egyptian uprising. Foreign Policy has a new article on how rising food prices and increasing food scarcity around the world could mean there is more severe political unrest on the horizon. There are indications that the world's food economies are entering unprecedented territory. Lester Brown at Foreign Policy sums up these new dynamics:

Welcome to the new food economics of 2011: Prices are climbing, but the impact is not at all being felt equally. For Americans, who spend less than one-tenth of their income in the supermarket, the soaring food prices we've seen so far this year are an annoyance, not a calamity. But for the planet's poorest 2 billion people, who spend 50 to 70 percent of their income on food, these soaring prices may mean going from two meals a day to one. Those who are barely hanging on to the lower rungs of the global economic ladder risk losing their grip entirely. This can contribute -- and it has -- to revolutions and upheaval.

Food crises and famine are familiar patterns in modern history but the drivers of the current crunch are more complex.

Historically, price spikes tended to be almost exclusively driven by unusual weather -- a monsoon failure in India, a drought in the former Soviet Union, a heat wave in the U.S. Midwest. Such events were always disruptive, but thankfully infrequent. Unfortunately, today's price hikes are driven by trends that are both elevating demand and making it more difficult to increase production: among them, a rapidly expanding population, crop-withering temperature increases, and irrigation wells running dry.

To make matters worse the U.S., whose stockpiles of grains have traditionally been a cushion for supply shocks, has depleted its storehouses and is less able to absorb world demand. 

As the article reports, this new world food landscape has countries that rely heavily on grain imports scurrying to secure supplies. Countries like South Korea are moving to create direct relationships with US farmers. Don't be surprised if you start to see large silos adorned with Korean lettering pop up around the grain-rich Palouse region. This has alread happened with hay supplies in central Washington. It's hard to miss the huge hay barns alongside I-90 near Ellensberg that are marked with Japanese lettering.

The author of the Foreign Policy article warns of an impending food armageddon marked by food nationalism and driven by climate change. It is a forboding message and one worth paying attention to, but the most important observation he makes is that the world's poor are on the hook for the worst of this impending crisis.

I saw this first hand at our last food distribution with Second Harvest here in the west valley of Spokane. It was a smaller-than-usual delivery of food, mostly because the stockpiles in the Second Harvest warehouse are depleted right now. I asked them about the current dynamics of food donations and they explained that with food prices and demand so high right now the large food companies are selling off more of their supplies, leaving less excess in the supply chain for food banks. This dynamic is a microcosm of what happens around the world. There is less excess in the system for impoverished peoples in regions with depleted land. 

These are challenging days ahead and it's easy to get overwhelmed but there are actions that can be taken to help those who are going to be hurt the most. It's a good time to get involved with and make a donation to organizations like Bread for the World where they advocate for the poor and hungry in important food-related legislation. Local food banks are going to need all the help they can get in the coming months as transportation costs increase. One of my favorite international aid organizations is Plant With Purpose, where they empower people in poverty to practice sustainable agriculture in their communities to help them become more self-reliant and less vulnerable to world food shocks.

It's also a good time to grow your own food.

New Report: 1 in 4 Packages of Meat at the Grocery Contain Multi-Drug Resistant Staph

A few weeks ago I wrote a post highlighting the book, Superbug by Maryn Mckenna. The book tracks the emergence of antibiotic-resistant MRSA and claims that the heavy use of antibiotics in industrial animal agriculture has contributed to the rise of these resistant strains of bacteria.

Mckenna has an article at Wired.com today that reports on a new scientific study on the presence of drug-resistant bacteria in meat for sale in stores. She reports:

A team of researchers from Arizona bought meat and poultry in five cities across the United States, tested them for bacteria, and found this: 47 percent of the samples contained the very common pathogen Staphylococcus aureus, and 96 percent of those isolates were resistant to at least one antibiotic. Of more concern: 52 percent of those staph isolates were resistant to at least three antibiotics that are commonly used in both veterinary and human medicine.

That is: Roughly one in four packages of meat and poultry from across the US contained multi-drug resistant staph.

Here's the breakdown of how different types of meat compared:

Among the types of meat tested, turkey carried the most resistance, with 77 percent of the meat samples showing at least some; that was followed by pork (42 percent), chicken (41 percent) and beef (37 percent). Interestingly, it wasn’t all the same staph. Though there was a great diversity of staph types, each animal species seemed to carry mostly one sequence type or strain of staph: ST1 in pigs, ST5 in chickens and ST398 in turkey.

Perhaps the most important finding in the study is that the source of the bacteria was not human contamination, rather the bacteria came from the animals themselves. Mckenna quotes study team member Lance Price:

“There’s an important second point: We found that each of the meat and poultry types had their own distinctive staph on them. That provides strong evidence that food animals were the primary source of the resistant staph. The source wasn’t human contamination of the meat at slaughter, or when it was packaged for retail sale.”

This is an important data point in the debate about the impact of antibiotic use in raising farm animals. The Ag. community has argued for years that no one has been able to prove a link between such use and the emergence of drug-resistant bacteria that is harmful to humans. The evidence is mounting that concentrated animal operations are not only bad for animals, but they are bad for humans as well.

Go here for a previous post on safety issues with America's meat supply.